Summary: Your Friends and Neighbours | Claire Perkins <em>Claire Perkins (Monash)</em> In February 1998, UK film journal Sight and Sound reached the letter “U” in an “A-Z of Cinema” series and set out a catalogue of various cinematic utopias and dystopias. Unsurprisingly, it was overwhelmingly science fiction works that were cited here as examples of films that animate utopian dialectics: <em>Metropolis</em> (Fritz Lang, 1927); <em>Blade Runner</em> (Ridley Scott, 1982); <em>Gattaca</em> (Andrew Niccol, 1997). Outside of this paradigm, though, another type of cinema that can be approached in this way is the “suburban nightmare” film that has been exemplified variously in <em>The Graduate</em> (Mike Nichols, 1967), <em>Blue Velvet</em> (David Lynch, 1986) and <em>The Unbelievable Truth</em> (Hal Hartley, 1992). Throughout the 1990s, the suburban nightmare became a particularly popular myth for both popular and independent American filmmaking and, of course, popular television (<em>Six Feet Under, Desperate Housewives, Weeds</em>). In much of this work, suburbia appears as a typically inverted utopia: a depersonalised world that, extrapolated from consumer capital, is dominated by attitudes of despair, anxiety and violence. This paper will discuss the articulation of this myth in the more nebulous tendency of the American ‘smart’ film. Drawing on examples including <em>Your Friends and Neighbours</em> (Neil LaBute, 1998), <em>The Safety of Objects</em> (Rose Troche, 2001), <em>Magnolia</em> (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999) and <em>The Chumscrubber</em> (Arie Posin, 2005), the paper will argue for the existence of the ‘suburban smart film’ as a specific anti-utopian type concerned with the exposition of social fact. With particular attention to the example of <em>Donnie Darko</em> (Richard Kelly, 2001) - a suburban smart science-fiction film - the paper will conclude by considering how some of these films mobilise discourses on becoming to animate a properly utopian dialectic, and advance a new cinematic utopianism.
